Eliza Fenwick

Eliza Fenwick (née Jaco; 1 February 1767 – 8 December 1840) was an English author whose works include Secresy; or The Ruin on the Rock (1795) and several children's books. She was born in Cornwall, married an alcoholic and had two children by him. She eventually left him to live with her children in Barbados, where she ran a school with her daughter.[1]

Contents

Eliza Jaco was born on 1 February 1767 at Pelynt, Cornwall. Her parents were Peter and Elizabeth Jaco (née Hawksworth), and she was baptized Elizabeth on 25 June 1766. She married a writer, John Fenwick, who became an alcoholic who developed significant debts,[2] in the 1780s and went on two have two children with him, Eliza and Orlando. She took up roles including governessing to make family ends meet, but eventually left Fenwick and moved to Ireland as a governess in 1807.[3]

By this time, Fenwick's daughter had moved to the West Indies to be an actor and married a man by the name of William Rutherford, by whom she had four children. Fenwick and her son, Orlando, joined her daughter in Barbados in 1814, although Orlando died of yellow fever in 1816. In 1819, Fenwick's son-in-law left the family, leaving the mother and daughter to bring up the four children. The pair ran a secondary school, which provided income and ensured the children's own education. Fenwick's daughter died in 1828, leaving her to raise the children alone.[2]

Throughout her life Fenwick corresponded with her friends, including Mary Hays, Thomas Holcroft, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Turner Smith, and Charles and Mary Lamb, much of which survives. Her epistolary novelSecresy; or The Ruin on the Rock was published "By a Woman" in 1795. Her subsequent works were written for children, sometimes under the pseudonym Rev. David Blair.[3]Mary and Her Cat (1804) was advertised as being "in words not exceeding two syllables".[1]Visits to the Junior Library (1805, facsimile 1977) tells of a ghastly West Indian family with a slave nurse being "reclaimed by discovering the joys of learning."[4]